A Monk's tale

Where am I?

“…Where am I?”, Shun muttered between dry lips as he regained consciousness and slowly opened his eyes. He gazed at his surroundings in search of a clue about his surroundings but he did not recognize where he was.

This brief lapse in time was suddenly interrupted by a sharp pain crossing his wrists and running all the way to his shoulders. Shun soon rememebered he had been shackled to the wall – his arms now were being held up high, aching from the strain his dormant body had put on them. The ebonite monk remembered to have put all of his strengths together to break the steel chain which was binding him to the wall but with no success. “I must have passed away from the effort…”, the thought.

As the ebonite tried to put himself on a standing position, he looked around in an effort to see what was around him. Shun was being held prisioner in what appeared to be a small cell, no bigger than a broom closet of his monastery. Other two shackles hung loose from the mason walls around him, and although they did not held any prisoners at the present moment, the dark, bloody stains on them suggested a darker use in the past. On the wall opposite to where Shun was there was a heavy-looking wooden door with bronze bindings. A slit in the middle of it allowed some light inside the small division.

Shun was unharmed but he could not put together any clear memory of the past days. He vaguely remembered speaking to Zenshi sensei and leaving the monastery, but he could not remember which purpose he had in mind, neither could he tell how long he had left the monastery and how he ended up in this scenario. But he could remember men – creepy men with bloodstained aprons restraining him to his shackles, the cold, piercing eyes of a woman staring at him through the door slit and endless screams of agony coming from beyond the door…